Thanks for the review. I've been eying the SD66 from William Optics as a piggyback astrophoto and travel scope. I'll have to give the 72FD some consideration. I particularly like the fact that it has a full 2" focuser rather than the SCT threads.

An interesting review of an interesting telescope. One small suggestion though: to avoid possible confusion regarding the difference between an achromat and an apochromat, I suggest that this sentence:

"In the recent years small achromatic refractors (APOs) have had..."

probably ought to instead read as follows:

"In the recent years small apochromatic refractors (APOs) have had..."

Bob: Ouch - I guess the spell checker doesn't check for my stupidity clearly it should have said apochromats instead of achromats! Thanks for pointing that out, I'll make sure that the typo gets corrected!

Haven't done any detailed side by side but visually the two scopes are very close. I'm a wide field kinda guy so I prefer the views in the little Megrez. I would say that the image brightness is pretty much the same. The greatest difference for me lies in the mechanics which are far superior with the 72FD. I especially never liked the requirement for an extension tube with the Megrez ED II Triplet.

If you want to buy a Megrez ED II cheap send me a PM as I don't need it anymore

If you want to buy a Megrez ED II cheap send me a PM as I don't need it anymore

Been there once...

I previously owned a Megrez 80 II SD and Megrez 80 II ED. I also previously owned two different ZS 66 SD... I have been considering another ZS 66 SD this time in white, but, along comes the new Megrez 72 FD! I had a chance to compare the Megrez 80 II ED to both the ZS 66 SD and my current Megrez 90 FD. The M80 II ED was closer to the Megrez 90 for visual...

So if the scope is close to the Megrez 80 II ED for visual use and the size is closer to the ZS 66 SD then it would be my logical pick...

Last night, just 8 hours ago in Korea, I was in a mountain together with 9 star gazing and imaging friends.(Our club name is Seoul Astronomy Club. Seoul is the capital city of Korea) Under the sky of excellent transparency and 7/10 seeing there were 12 scopes; Takahashi, Pentax, Vixen, Celestron, Skywatcher... so on. Among them really pretty Megrez 72FD with Takahashi FS60C as a guide scope. It was ready to be tested for visual performance after a few shots of imaging. 4 members looked Arcturus through Vixen LV 2.5mm and saw something not expected; Fresnel rings full of CA! Even in-focus-image looked so much colorful. To make it worse about 1/7 of airy disk (if it could be named as airy disk!) was fuzzy very similar to a tail of a comet (It did no look like a coma.). We moved the scope to Saturn. And?, same; colorful Saturn. We thought the eyepiece might have big problems so we changed it to Pentax XW 7mm and 5mm on 2.5x Powermate but nothing improved. That is; FD72 has the problems. Unfortunately for 72FD there were Takahashi FS60C and FS-78. So the 72FD gave us serious bad feeling; a sort of garbage optics.